Displaying items by tag: queens college

Queens College was the fortuitous recipient of a wide-ranging assortment of photographs from the Matthew R. Bergey Collection. Twenty-nine are on display, arranged in chronological order, beginning with an anonymous “Seashell Still Life” from 19th-century France and Roger Fenton’s “Classic Bust (from the British Museum)” (c. 1860s). These are followed by a portrait from Julia Margaret Cameron and an architectural picture from Eugène Atget, two of the most admired photographers from the second half of the 19th century.

A 1930s shoeshine stand bedecked with gilded knobs and beaded fringe, which was once exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art — where it played a role in a famous director’s ouster — resurfaced last month and is headed back into the public eye.

The Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., purchased the imaginatively decorated stand, which was created by an Italian immigrant bootblack, Giovanni Indelicato, who ran a makeshift booth on lower Broadway and sometimes went by the name Joe Milone. The Fenimore bought it a few weeks ago for $10,000, after the New York folklorist Joseph Sciorra of Queens College, a specialist in Italian-American culture, alerted the museum, which has a specialty in American folk art, that the piece had re-emerged after decades in obscurity.